Useful Links

This blog offers plenty of valuable information such as:
A complete and up-to-date guide about the Maths GCSE exams that students can use to inform themselves and get ahead in preparing for the said exam.

This blog is produced by the recruitment agency Engage Education and covers a wide variety of issues relevant to teachers. It includes advice on how to be a better teacher in the classroom, advice on how teachers can best manage their career, how to look after themselves outside of the school, and so on.

Five really comprehensive, free schemes of work - one for each level of reformed Functional Mathematics.

Each document lists the reformed content and suggests the number of GLH (guided learning hours) to devote to each descriptor. The order of teaching is left to the teacher's discretion. Each topic / content descriptor is explored in detail with handy lists of:

Pearson have a really useful page with links to all the important Reformed Functional Skills (FS) documents.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to find my favourites: two in-house content mapping documents where the new FS maths and English content is mapped to the old content AND to the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Maths or English Specification.

The mapping documents are colour coded so you can quickly see brand new content and also content that has moved down from a previously higher level.

A tutoring platform helping to connect local tutors to students. Tutorfair also promises that for every student who pays, they make a donation to help a student who can't. So far they have helped thousands of learners from challenging schools, giving free tuition to 7778 students in 21 different schools.

City and Guilds have a very informative page about the upcoming Functional Skills reform.

This includes a useful downloadable mapping document for FS Mathematics (see image) from Entry Level 1 through to Level 2. The revised content is clearly mapped against the existing content and the adult numeracy curriculum. I believe documents about English are to follow shortly.

If you register you can join and attend live webinars about the reform (or you can catch up on these via YouTube - without registering).

This is a really useful video for L2 Reading for Pearson Functional Skills as it shows the ‘banker’ questions and guides learners (and tutors) to where the marks are. This can be used in class or for homework/self study.